This book seeks to draw on both ‘academic and practitioner perspectives’ in its examination of the challenges faced by policy makers in the UK today. It utilises a key text of the New Labour government's modernisation project, Professional Policy Making for the Twenty-First Century (Cabinet Office Strategic Policy Making Team, 1999) as its overarching framework for analysis. Drawing on rationalist principles this report identified nine ‘competencies’ of policy making, these competencies form the basis for analysis in the main nine chapters of the book. The text is therefore more than a loose collection of edited papers, it seeks to bring together perspectives from both ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ the policy-making process (utilising a wide range of case studies) around the theme of ‘modernisation’. In engaging with this theme the editors seek to draw a distinction between ‘academic’ and ‘practitioner’ perspectives (reflecting the books title), however this is somewhat disingenuous given that the majority of the contributors have their roots, if not both feet in the academe.

The editors are clearly motivated by the desire to avoid purely ‘external’ criticisms of the modernisation process and to identify the issues from the practitioners perspective. This leads them to ask policy analysts ‘to consider where they stand in relation to many of the issues associated with better policy making’ (p. 18). As someone whose primary concern is to further an understanding of the policy process through research and critique, I find such statements potentially problematic if we are being asked to associate ourselves with the programme of government. Fortunately for the overall health of the book, many of the contributors do retain their critical faculties and use their examination of policy making ‘through the policy makers perspective’ to engage in a robust critique of the ‘modernisation’ agenda. Although on this point it should be pointed out that, because each of the contributors understandably wants to revisit the background to the ‘modernisation of policy making’ in order to provide the context for their own analysis, there is rather a lot of replication of detail concerning the nine ‘competencies’.

The Introduction provides a descriptive account of the evolution of constructs that have become synonymous with the New Labour ‘modernisation’ agenda; from ‘evidence-based policy’, ‘multi-level governance’ and ‘performance-management’, to ‘E-government’ and user choice. Yet in choosing to utilise the ‘nine competencies’ as a tool of analysis on the questionable basis that it focuses on the ‘reality’ of policy making, theory itself receives only the briefest of outlines here. This is potentially problematic both from the perspective of an undergraduate readership, and other audiences not familiar with the basic analytical tools of policy analysis (particularly so given the book's title).

The first chapter examining ‘forward looking’ policy making offers some useful descriptive case studies and questions whether governments have the tools at their disposal to accurately forecast changing contexts and demands. The next chapter on ‘outward-looking’ policy making written by Edward Page and Jane Mark-Lawson examines the use of international models and practices as a potential cross-national learning base for the New Labour modernisation agenda. The chapter concludes that there are serious intellectual and political constraints within government that limit the systematic drawing of policy lessons from outside the UK, and that at best cross-national policy examples act as heuristics for policy learning. The chapter on ‘innovative, flexible and creative’ policy making written by Andrew Massey and Jamie Rentoul forcefully argues that we can only understand the possibilities for, and barriers to innovation through an understanding of the mechanisms of governance (here clearly defined). Martin Bulmer et al.'s chapter on ‘evidence-based’ policy making also cuts through the mantra of ‘competencies’, by arguing that the techniques of the systematic review are only slowly emerging in public policy formation, which remains dominated by political expediency. They conclude that it is more accurate to talk about ‘evidence-informed’ rather than ‘evidence-based’ policy making. The chapters on ‘inclusive’, and ‘joined-up’ policy making (effectively deploying case-studies) both detect clear signs that the Cabinet Office's rationalist principles are becoming embedded within the policy-making process.

Powell and Maynard's ‘review of reviews’ argues that whilst ‘never in the field of government has so much been reviewed by so many!’ (p. 148), it is actually quite difficult to specify what exactly the effects of these reviews have been. This returns to the issue of what constitutes ‘evidence’, and how it is selectively utilised in practice by policy makers. The concern with the uses of ‘evidence’ and specifically the measurement of policy performance is also of concern in the chapter on policy ‘evaluation’ written by Robert Walker and Sue Duncan. This contribution recognises a shift as having occurred in the policy making culture which has led to a greater willingness to engage in a systematic evaluation of policies even if the conclusions are not always acted upon by government. In a very interesting final chapter, John Hudson rejects the ‘reductionist’ conceptions of the system of government found embedded in the nine competencies set out in Professional Policy Making for the Twenty-First Century. Hudson seeks to draw upon complexity theory in order to assess the ‘process’ of ‘learning lessons’ in ‘whole open systems’ (an understanding of learning rarely used by policy makers who utilise a much narrower conception), drawing attention to the interactions that occur between different parts of a policy system.

In conclusion, the framework employed by the editors to examine the perspective of ‘practitioners’ ultimately serves to hidebound the book's contributors rather than opening new windows onto the process of policy making. This is a conclusion which in large part derives from the assessment of the process of policy making drawn by the majority of the contributors themselves. That is, policy making is not conducted primarily on the basis of a list of rationalist principles, but by a combination of context, pragmatism and ideology.